Month November 2013

iOS unit sales crossed over 700 million units last month. That is a significant milestone but the total number of units in use is likely to be lower. My estimate based on device replacement assumptions is that about 500 million are still in use.

The estimated break-down of units sold and in use by device type is shown below:

I joined Benedict Evans and Ben Bajarin on their Cubed podcast to discuss innovation and cultures that breed innovation. We also discuss some updates on our thinking of the curious case of the android tablet ghosts toward the end.

Voila is the most powerful screen capturing software available for your Mac. Voila lets you capture and record content and then easily share it with friends and co-workers or upload it to the web.

Voila is the perfect screen recorder for your Mac. You can easily make high-quality product demos, DIY app simulations, and tutorials. Create interactive content by recording your Mac screen along with audio and all your click streams. Then complete your screencast by annotating your screenshots with professional tools and features. Record like a pro and publish your final project to FTP/SFTP, Tumblr, Dropbox, Evernote, and YouTube with Voila.

Made for Mavericks, Voila is simple and intuitive. With Voila, keep your captures organized and within your reach while enjoying a boost in productivity.

Benedict Evans explains well the problem with measuring Android tablets. There are no reliable data collected because many of the devices are invisible through the regular, measurable channels:

There are no firms which report their shipments

They are not sold through retail chains which normally are sampled in the US and Europe (NPD and GfK respectively.)

They don’t show up in browsing or ad transaction data

Google Play statistics are missing most of the activations since they are not sold as bona fide Google-sanctioned Android.

The only measured statistic happens to be component shipments. Items such as screens, CPUs or perhaps memory might be visible to market analysts. It’s therefore tempting to add up tires manufactured to determine what’s getting sold in auto dealerships.

The adoption of smartphones in the US is on track for reaching 90% of the available audience by August 2016. This is a mere eight years after smartphones reached 10% penetration. As far as technologies go, that’s pretty fast. To get an idea of how rapid, I plotted a few other technologies and the time they took to grow within the US market.

The fascination with highly visible but largely unknown business models continues. How do infomercials work? What is the value of fashion? How can you make money when no creative idea can be protected? Why is Apple building a sapphire manufacturing facility? It’s all part of a pattern.

Your client deadline is in the morning and you really need some web design resources to finish out the project. A dollar here and a dollar there, often stock items add up quickly.

Just because you’re using stock doesn’t mean you have to jack up your prices. There is a better way to stay competitive.

Lootback, the newest addition to your design toolbelt, pays you to make your purchase from the big stock retailers like Envato, iStock, Shutterstock, DepositPhotos, and ThinkStock.

With Lootback you can search all the marketplaces in one spot. Once you find that perfect item, create an account with Lootback, then head over to the other marketplace and buy it. Lootback will track your purchase and get paid a commission for generating the sale. Then they split that commission with you and credit your account to lower your overall costs.

It’s a pretty unique idea that I’ve never seen before. Lootback will save you time and money, so be sure to give it a try.

The Transportationist, David Levinson @trnsprttnst joins us to discuss the technical, human, environmental and economic factors driving change to the auto-ecosystem.David helps us smartly survey the landscape via:

I’ve been writing about Apple’s capital intensive operations for some time. The difficulty has always been in explaining the scale involved. I’ve compared the spending to that of Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Intel and Amazon. But these numbers still can’t be easily grasped. You can’t point to any comparable objects when you try to explain the figure. I struggle to create a less abstract notion than that of a “sea of tooling and servers.”

Instead, I’ve used the analogy of US aircraft carriers. Historically, Nimitz class aircraft carriers have cost a less than $5 billion. The USS Ronald Reagan, christened in 2001, cost $4.5 billion. Therefore I was comfortable saying that Apple spends the equivalent of about one Nimitz class aircraft carrier every six months (and that the Navy takes about six years to put it together.)

Unfortunately, costs for aircraft carriers have gone up. The USS Gerald Ford will take about $13 billion to complete. That places Apple and Samsung capital spending in the following context: